It was an experiment to port the famous tile based game SameGame into a real-world physics environment, and despite it was nothing that a prototype with some bugs – especially with collision management – the game got some success, with about 2.5 million views and two sponsorships by Rotten Tomato Games (now offline) and GirlGames.

Now I am making a sequel of the game, more polished, fun and playable, and it’s time to release the source code of the good old SamePhysics.

You are warned: the code is “as is” and it’s not even the latest Box2D distribution, but I think it could be interesting to learn the basics of Box2D programming from a real world successful example.

Download the source code.

In this physics game you have to beat all 40 levels collecting as much orbs as you can, throwing the ball with a sling. To make your life harder, several kind of blocks to avoid or interact with.

You can find some information about the prototype in these posts:

* Controlling a ball like in Flash Elasticity game tutorial
* Flash Elasticity prototype – AS3 version
* When Elasticity meets Bloons

The physics is powered by Box2D, while I used Flint particle system for the particles.

Talking about advertising, I used MochiMedia for the in-game ads and FlashGameLicense to find a sponsorship.

I recommend Rick from Hairy Games: he provides constructive feedback, helps you to make the game better and the branding process is easy.

I also used both Playtomic and MochiBot to track game statistics.

Play ita, rate it and give me feedback.

I will update you with some interesting new about the game once it’s in the wild for some time.

The official theme for FGS 2012 is Maximize Your Game. Why? Game developers (and the industry in general) are doing amazing things with Flash games. We are seeing games being designed and created (maximized) for multiple devices and platforms. Developers are increasing (maximizing) the value of their IP. Game designers and artists are improving (maximizing) the overall quality of their games. New tools and resources are available to help improve (maximize) development time. Marketing and monetization strategies are emerging to enhance (maximize) overall game distribution, discovery, and revenue streams. Maximize Your Game reflects all of the exciting innovation we are seeing in the Flash games industry today.

Moreover, there is space for speakers in the following topics:

* Mobile-specific
* Design
* Development
* Marketing strategy
* Designing for multiple devices
* Game post-mortems
* Game Development
* Multi-player
* Developing for multiple platforms
* Development tools
* Performance optimization
* Game Design
* Design tips & tricks
* Game post-mortems
* 3D-specific
* Pros and cons
* Optimizing 2D performance
* Using Stage 3D
* Game post-mortems
* Business
* Building a business (going from one person to a small team)
* Artwork
* Graphics
* Animation

And it’s not over yet! Sign up for the conference with the discount code blog_Emanuele (hey! It’s me!!) and attend the summit with a 15% OFF!!

It’s an avoider game based upon the post develop a Flash game like String Avoider – AS3 version – and more! with 40 levels.

Once you complete a level, you’ll get up to three white stars according to how quickly you completed it, and the aim of the game is to collect all 40*3=120 stars.

The making of the game

I always wanted to develop an avoider game, since I’m quite a fan of this genre of games. More than three years ago I made Jamag and it was played only a million times, so I wanted to do something better.

I added some new features such as items to collect to complete the level, and a quite unique way to collect them, not just hitting but drawing a lasso around them.

This was the hardest part to code, but I solved it with an easy trick I’ll explain during next posts.

The particle effects are powered by Flint particle system which I’ve found easy, flexible and powerful, and I used Playtomic to keep track of game plays and level progression.

Uh, and there’s an interesting anti-cheat system which prevents you to use the right mouse button to “teleport” to the exit. This is quite easy in AS2, a little more tricky in AS3.

Monetization of the game

I updated the game on FlashGameLicense and I got offers from Soogames, LioFlash and GameBoltz, and I want to give them a big THANK YOU, but in the end I saw a banner on FGL about a performance system by Fupa so I decided to try it since I never used this kind of way to monetize a game.

Basically when you send a player to Fupa, you’ll receive $0.04 for every game played and a $0.04 bonus if the player registers to the portal.

I see something interesting in it although playing on Fupa as guest is quite an hassle, you have to wait for a ton of ads, but all in all it’s an experiment and I’ll able to publish some results soon.

For the main monetization I used MochiMedia with version control, so I will be able to push other ads if Fupa won’t perform well.

I am open to sitelocked sponsorships so feel free to make an offer if you want the game branded exclusively for your portal.

Games in progress

At the moment there is Slingy, a physics collecting game for bidding on FGL, and I am developing my first StencylWorks with a work in progress name of “Kira the Witch” which will be probably changed to “Kira the Gipsy”.

That’s all at the moment, I hope you’ll enjoy playing Stringy like I enjoyed developing it. And don’t forget to rate it with a 5/5…

It’s a game (and what a game!) by Raphaël Roux, who also used Flex to create and release a level editor full of interesting features such as database management, Facebook connect, and more.

Raphaël shares with us his experience:

Previously on Claytus Hood Tower Defense

Let’s take Claytus’ story where we left it off last time :

The first episode of Claytus was released on summer 2010, and it was the subject this post.

Then between September 2010 and April 2011, I was hired as a web development teacher at the University of Savoy (France). This was a really good experience combining programming and social relations, I loved it !

On the last post dedicated to Claytus, I talked about a tower defense level editor.
At this time, I had built a simple tool coded in Flex to help me balance the waves of enemies of the original game, but the software was not really designed in a friendly user way.
I had a wish : make this software available for players, and this is what we’ll be talking about in this post!

Define the functionalities

I wanted a browser application, with no installation needed for the player, like any Flash game, so I chose to improve my Flex skills.

This is commonly called Rich Internet Application (RIA), when you’ve got a complex software running on web browsers and Flash player.

This level editor must have a lot of features, this is a quick overview :
- Manage users : creating account, log the users, and Facebook connect
- Design your own tower defense levels.
- Save your work on Claytus’ server.
- Share your work with Claytus community.
- Linking all this in a community website, with all the common features such as comments, rates and scoring.

Time to code!

Building a Rich Internet Application (RIA) in Flex 4.5

I’ve learned how to work with Flex on the Flex 3 SDK with the “training from the source” official book, so I had to learn a lot about Flex 4.5, because in the meantime, there has been a lot of changes on the Flex 4.5 SDK.

Always the geekish way for me to learn about IT

Most part of these changes was about the new Spark components library, and how to deal with the new layouts.
A bit less intuitive, stricter than the Flex 3 SDK and its MX components, but this is all for the good !

Nowadays, Flex 4.5 is not totally finished, in my opinion.
Most of the components of MX are ported in Spark, but the features aren’t all enabled for some of them, so I had to mix between MX and Spark components, this was pretty tricky to make good choices.

Communicate with server and databases

First thing I had to do was to find a reliable and powerful way to communicate between my RIA, my server and databases.

So I chose to use amfPHP, a messaging system, very handy to do these kind of communications.

You can easily share an AS3 object with the PHP version of this same object on the server.
This is called object versionning, and I recommend you to dig around this API !
I had to modify the amfPHP API to share the PHP session between the level editor and Claytus website, there’s a little trick about the session name :)

During the sharing process of your level, amfphp allows me to send the byteArray of the level, so that I can save jpeg on server side and make thumbnails.
It also receives the data of the level (tilemap, landscape and waves …) that I save into a XML on the server.

I use this API each time I have to deal with server side stuff.
As I said, the PHP scripts used with the level editor are the same that in the website, so I have a pretty flexible webservice !

What about the website?

I designed the website like a community website.
I had to implement comments, ratings and score board, everything is home made.

Three major parts :
- Original game
- Shared levels : levels created by the members of the community.
- Level editor : introducing the level editor with a tutorial (a new video will come asap).

I also setup a forum based on a myBB forum.
The trickiest thing was to automatically create a forum account when you create a Claytus account.
So I manually edited the PHP code of myBB, so that users can login both on the forum and the website with their email and password.

I worked a lot on a natural way to rank my pages on search engines, I put all I got in term of SEO.
I also implemented the Facebook Open Graph :
if you take a look at my html sources, you’ll see meta tags especially for the Open Graph.
This way, Facebook considers each of my pages as an Open Graph object, and it appears on Facebook’s search engine.
I can also specify the picture or the video that appears on your wall when you share one of these pages.

I tried to make smooth animations and interactions all over the website with the JQuerry API to have a modern webdesign.
It is very important not to reload the page when the user wants to comment or rate a shared level. If not, the game would be lost and more than one user would certainly be upset and the feature would bring nothing to the community !
I also tried to innovate with the “Explorer” button, that shows you a nice site map to explore Claytus’ world.

Facebook Connect

I had to implement Facebook connect both on the website and the level editor, not easy as it sounds…
An AS3 API for Facebook Connect exists, called GraphAPI.

The thing is that you can’t test your script locally, if your RIA is not uploaded on a server, it won’t work…
” Compile > Upload > Test ”
Several minutes between each of my tests, this drove me crazy :)

There is a way to test without uploading, but your app has to be for AIR.

The other thing is very, very important :
First week, not all of my Facebook Connect requests were successful.
I mean, registrations were well done, but the users couldn’t log themselves…

Why ?!
Because when you store a Facebook user id in your databases, please DO NOT use a INT(11) for your user ids, but set a BIGINT(20) ! If not, you’ll get troubles, because now, FB uids are very long.
This is the first thing FB should say in their documentation in my opinion :)

Funding, monetizing

This time, I plan to make money with my project, it’s a full time job and I hope to earn my living with this project.

A big part of Claytus is still available for free but I now sell lifetime licenses with Paypal.
With a license, players will have full access to all of the features of Claytus community with no restriction.
It was not so easy to code the Paypal callback because their documentation is pretty large and you find a lot of outdated tutorials. I finally found my way in this mess.

I chose a single Paypal button for payment, so you can pay both with a Paypal account and classical credit cards.
After the payment, I send a serial number to the payer’s email, so that he can easily activate his license.

I got no external funding for the development, I hope the customers will cover the future development fees.
During the development I sell licenses 50% off, like Minecraft does.

What next?

Depends on the selling of licenses, there are many ways to plan the future:
- Just a few selling : It will fund the server.
- Reasonable selling : I will update the community as much as I can with new avatars, new landscapes items and enemy sprites for the editor, if I get enough to live and pay the illustrators / musicians.
- Good selling : Smart phone application and Xbox live ?

In the meantime I’m dedicated to community management, and I’m trying to code some little projects in freelance during my spare time (when is it ?)

Conclusion

After one year of work, I learned a lot about many things in IT.
I would like to thank all the developers who write articles and share their experiences about these subjects, they’re all my teachers.
Emanuele is one of them of course, he does a great job with his blog, but you already know that, because you’re reading this article!

I’m here to share my experience with you, please feel free to ask me your questions about coding techniques or Claytus community, whatever you want !

I hope you will enjoy my work, I put all the love I have for video games in this project, and I hope it will survive through years to come with a nice community !

At this time a tutorial should be available on the level editor’s home page in English.
I can’t wait to have your feedbacks :)

Spread the word !

Thank you !

While I have no plans about AS2 tutorials, there’s an interesting deal you can enjoy:

The AS2 Games Pack, that is the collection of the 12 Flash games I released during AS2 years, whith more than 50 million loads!

I am not talking about prototypes, but the full, complete games with source codes. The same games I published, are included here.

Getting the AS2 Games Pack is a must if you are Flash game developer because you can grab the source code of successful games, improve the gameplay, change the graphics and you will have a brand new game with a genuine addicting gameplay ready to be published.

Even if you abandoned AS2, you can easily convert the games on AS3 and publish them as AS3 games, or mobile games.

Since I am giving you the games exactly how I made them, in most games you will find more versions, with different APIs which could be outdated, but the source code is fully working.

Let’s have a look at the games:

1 – Circle Chain

The game which started it all. My first Flash game, the opener of the experiment which still continues. Reviewed on Jay is Games.

2 – Christmas Couples

Christmas themed game which can easily ported into mobile devices.

3 – Tileball

A space running game inspired by the classic C64 game Trailblazer. There are some sites selling the source code of a prototype of this game at an irrational amount of money.

4 – GuessNext

Card game which have been recently ported into an iPhone Web App

5 – Glomb

Grow-avoider game, the very first game to use MochiMedia‘s leaderboards.

6 – BallBalance

Addicting puzzle game sponsored by Kongregate, also featured in my book.

7 – Bees n’ Flowers

Puzzle game with experimental gameplay, interesting for a mobile porting

8 – Jamag

Jamag = Just Another Mouse Avoider Game, but with a twist.

9 – Summer Couples

Drawing/matching game, I’d love to see a mobile version of it

10 – Rrode

One-button game with 2 game modes and 51 levels, sponsored by Hallpass

11 – Halloween Couples

Drawing/matching game on an hexagonal playground

12 – Red Flowers

Touch and switch puzzle game with 28 levels

Today, you can have this complete collection of real commercial games for as low as $9.99

Selling full games source codes is another way to monetize a Flash game in its aftermath, and there are portals looking for source codes to buy, but I wanted to extend the deal to every reader/developer/fan at an extremely low price.

If you make money out of this package, share your experience and I will happy to publish it on the blog.

While PayPal back-end allows users to fully manage their accounts, there are some features it still lacks.

Real world example: let’s say you are selling a digital good, such as the source code of your latest Flash game, or an ebook.

Since there is no shipment as the buyer will download it or receive it by email, he expects to get the book/game a few minutes after the payment.

That’s ok if you check your PayPal account every 10 minutes, manually sending emails to buyers, but once in a while you need to sleep… or have a shower… who will send your book then?

That’s why services like PayLoadz come into play, managing transactions and digital delivery for a monthly subscription and a per transition fee.

If you don’t want to use third part services, PayPal offers the Instant Payment Notification to automate your digital deliveries.

Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is PayPal’s message service that sends a notification when a transaction is affected. Once IPN is integrated, sellers can automate their back office so they don’t have to wait for payments to come in to trigger order fulfillment.

The process is simple: once you have a PayPal account, in your profile page click “Instant Payment Notification Preferences” under “Selling Preferences”, and you will be asked for an URL.

This is the URL of a page on your server which will act as a listener for PayPal payments.

Then, all you have to do is write your own listener based on the information you will find in the official docs. Wait, I forgot to tell you three things:

1) The script is wrong, it will give an error because there are missing curly brackets

2) The given address where to test the script is wrong, it’s not www.sandbox.paypal.com anymore

3) The script (once corrected) won’t work on every server since relies on fsockopen. In my opinion it would have been better to use cURL

So, this is the script I suggest to use:

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<?php
 
$request = "cmd=_notify-validate"; 
foreach ($_POST as $varname => $varvalue){
	$email .= "$varname: $varvalue\n";  
	if(function_exists('get_magic_quotes_gpc') and get_magic_quotes_gpc()){  
		$varvalue = urlencode(stripslashes($varvalue)); 
	}
	else { 
		$value = urlencode($value); 
	} 
	$request .= "&$varname=$varvalue"; 
} 
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,"https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr");
//curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,"https://www.paypal.com");
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST,true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,$request);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,false);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
switch($result){
	case "VERIFIED":
		// verified payment
		break;
	case "INVALID":
		// invalid/fake payment
		break;
	default:
		// any other case (such as no response, connection timeout...)
}
 
?>

Simply comment/uncomment lines 15-16 if you want to use it in sandbox or real mode.

Once the payment is VERIFIED, you can send the email with the game/book/activation code to the email address you will find in POST[payer_email] variable. You can find the complete list of passed variables at this page.

To test it, once you activated your IPN and installed the script on your web server, register as a PayPal developer, then test your IPN in the sandbox page.

In a few days, a fully working example on this site, with some deals at an extraordinary price.

and play GuessNext for iPhone!

It’s the web remake of an old game I published on Kongregate more than three years ago, and it’s the perfect kind of game if you want to take the first steps into iPhone web app development.

During the next days I will explain in detail every (interesting) line of code, meanwhile have a look at the features:

* Powered by jQuery Mobile
* Optimized to be launched from Home
* Loading screen (only if played from Home)
* Custom icon when adding it to Home
* Reminder to add it to Home if the game is not launched from Home
* Smooth transitions between pages
* Best score saved locally
* In game Adsense ads
* Views and plays tracking powered by Playtomic

The game was built starting from the tutorials Making a game with HTML + jQuery Mobile and publishing it to Apple App Store step 1 and step 2, reading those tutorials will give you a lot of clues about the development of this game.

Your feedback is needed to improve a bit the game, to finally convert it into a native iPhone app. Also, I would like to know your best scores.

If you liked the game, you can play a special edition on Mass Effect 3 official site, at this page.

This is the first time I had to change the theme of a game in order to make it fit into the look & feel of a website – and we are talking about the Mass Effect 3 website! – so I did my best to turn a kids game into a sort of military training. You also have to know that on ME3 site they refer to games as Cognitive Interactive Applications, so I also needed to change the menu, removing those “Play” and “How to play” button you won’t expect to find on an Cognitive Interactive Application.

Following ME3 guys feedback, I changed a bit the gameplay and created a set of textures based on some graphic assets they gave me, modified with Genetica.

It was really an honor to have this opportunity, and while I am working on an original game for the ME3 site, I want to share with you this new (at least for me) opportunity to monetize a Flash game: skin the game and change the theme to make it fit into some specific websites.

I think my next game will have some kind of “Halloween Edition”, “Christmas Edition”, and so on, to be sold to theme-based arcade portals, or to follow some gaming trends, such as turning every game into a zombie game.

According to IGN, Mass Effect 3 will be released on March 6, 2012… meanwhile you can interact with the Cognitive Interactive Applications during next months.

A lot of time passed (actually two years in Flash related industry is really a big amount of time), and guess what happened to Hooda Math? It turned into a 2,000,000 visitors/month portal.

Michael shares with us the milestones of this long time ride:

Arcade growth can be determined by 4 stages: in-house games distribution, sponsorships, site-locks, and exclusively hosted.

Stage one, in-house game creation and distribution, the arcade owner cannot afford to sponsor games, so he develops his own games, brands them, spreads them and hopes for traffic. At the same time you are adding games to your site with another sites branding all over it. But hey at least your arcade has games and hopefully good ones. Feel free to use some of ours at http://hm.gs/free.

Stage two, sponsorship, the arcade owner has made a little money, now he can either pay someone to create games for his site or start sponsoring already developed games. Either way the arcade owner is going to fork over some of his petty cash. For the most bang for his buck it is probably easiest to go sponsor a game at FGL (a lot of times the developer will want to include mochi or cpmstar ads, and to keep the price down you will subcumb). At least he did not have to waste time making games; instead the arcade owner can waste time spamming, improving SEO or figuring out some other way to get people to come to his site, like writing guest posts on blogs with his anchor text, “Math Games“, and a link to his site within it. Look up anchor text, it is very important for SEO and, more importantly, he should be looking up and learning about SEO, which is always changing. Not to mention social marketing like http://facebook.com/hoodamath/.

Stage three, site-locks, when the arcade owner has received a decent amount of traffic to your site and he is making enough money that if he got fired, he could still survive on rent, an Internet connection, and peanut butter and crackers (and really cheap beer). Analysis comes into play and he should be asking himself, “So, why are you still wasting ad space on other peoples ads and out-links.” Every time a user clicks a “more games” link inside another arcade’s branded game, they could have been clicking on one of your google ads! (notice how I am speaking directly to stage 3 arcade owners now). Listen, now that you have a lot of traffic, do the math, if thousands of people are clicking to go play a game elsewhere, when they could have clicked on an ad to buy penny loafers, you just lost money. It is time to buy site-locks, because you still want the already developed games, but rather pay a chunk of money up front and not lose clicks or worse yet traffic. Stage 3 will last a while. Stage three is the money stage, where most arcade owners would love to be. A perfect example, Armor Games, notice how all of their games are branded or site-locked with swords. I personally believe Armor should be on Stage 4, but Stage 4 is more of a state of mind than an actual business strategy. Stage 4 is where Addicting Games lives and few others should be. Impulsively, in Hooda Math Games land we like to fool ourselves and hang-out in Stage 4.

Stage 4, exclusively hosted games. You may be asking, “Why would I not brand the hell out of great game and spread it to the top sites to get more traffic. Hopefully, after doing the math, your arcade believes that, like site-locks, the benefits of exclusively hosting out-weighs advertising by distribution. You may delude yourself into thinking, “Your arcade has received as much traffic as possible from other sites. I would like to remind you that the other arcades still host your old branded games and hopefully new users are still discovering your arcade. But now your arcade wants users to think that the only place they can play a game like “Grow School” (yes, there is a Grow School now). Play Grow School at http://hm.gs/growschool. (More about Short Links on my blog, mikeedla.com).

Caveat, not every arcade follows these 4 stages. Some arcade owners are tripping and jump straight to Stage 4, and others are stingy and refuse to leave Stage 2. Either way, this article is the current belief of an arcade owner that has earned 2 million Monthly Uniques in under 3 years times.